Suharto's luxury lodge abandoned

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Lilybank Lodge, the exclusive South Island hunting resort built by the youngest son of disgraced Indonesian President Suharto, lies abandoned after an apparently unsuccessful attempt to sell it.

Several truckloads of chattels and livestock have been removed from the $7.5 million resort, at the top of Lake Tekapo in Mackenzie Country, and taken to a big new deer-breeding operation owned by a former Suharto family associate south of Roxburgh, in Central Otago.

Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, a Suharto son who is now a fugitive from justice in Indonesia after being found guilty of a $27.5 million land scam, ostensibly sold the lodge with its 8ha of freehold land and 2136ha of crown pastoral lease for a mere $1.

The sale, to his former Singaporean business partner Alan Poh, was registered in July last year, but Tommy Suharto's name remained on companies office files as its 95 per cent shareholder until this month.

Mr Poh received Overseas Investment Commission approvals in February and June to buy two properties covering 443ha at Millers Flat, south of Roxburgh, for $1.6 million for an export deer-breeding operation.

His manager is Gerard Olde-Olthof, who previously looked after Lilybank for Tommy Suharto, and moved to Millers Flat several weeks ago after emptying the lodge.

Lilybank's phone has been disconnected and Mr Olde-Olthof's cellphone has been out of service range for several days.

The property commands a spectacular position under the Southern Alps and once cost guests more than $700 a night to stay there.

An Auckland property investor says he was offered the property for about $5 million six weeks ago, but would have no bar of it.

"We were offered it on a plate but the whole thing sounded like a can of worms. It was a bit like being offered a VCR in a hotel for $50," he told the Herald.

He was concerned not only with the ethics of buying the property, but the risk of having it confiscated if it was later found to have been built from the proceeds of corruption.

Justice Minister Phil Goff has acknowledged that the property left Tommy Suharto's hands "in somewhat suspicious circumstances" and faces renewed calls by New Zealand lobby groups to investigate its sale.

A spokesman for Mr Poh told the Herald in May that the sale was genuine and took account of big liabilities on the property. But a source with intimate knowledge of its history says there would have been far less than $1 million owed on it.

Yet Tommy Suharto spent $7.5 million buying Lilybank Station in 1992 and then building the lodge on it.

Indonesian Attorney-General Marzuki Darusman has, meanwhile, seized two of Tommy Suharto's properties in Jakarta, and intends swooping on a further 22 titles as collateral for money owed after Suharto was convicted over a $27.5 million land scam.

Mr Darusman expressed interest at a meeting in Jakarta in August with anti-free-trade activist Aziz Choudry in sending a fact-finding mission to New Zealand to trace the Suharto family's overseas assets.

But Mr Goff told the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa last month that Mr Darusman had yet to request New Zealand assistance.

"Given the ongoing uncertainties surrounding the outcome of the corruption trials of the ex-President and his youngest son [Tommy], it may be some time before the Attorney-General and his staff are able to focus on any possible New Zealand angle."

Indonesia Human Rights Committee spokeswoman Maire Leadbeater wrote last week to Mr Goff saying New Zealand should do more to help recover the Suhartos' ill-gotten gains. She urged Parliament's foreign affairs and defence committee to investigate links between the Suharto family and New Zealand companies, notably Brierley Investments.

Brierley is part-owned through the Camerlin consortium by the Salim group of Suharto senior's wealthiest crony, Liem Sioe Liong. It also had to take on Tommy Suharto as a minority shareholder in its troubled $1 billion Wayang Windu geothermal power project in West Java, although he stepped down as a director after his father was toppled from power.